Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Why are we here?

I noticed that Google's Picasa changed the format of their page layout yesterday without any notice. There was no longer the option of leaving additional comments against the images which have been placed online. This was a bit annoying for me because it was very convenient to leave a hyperlink back the Fremantlebiz page where the picture was first discussed.

Now there's a lesson in this and it's that any material placed in an online archive is actually not very safe as far as its longevity is concerned. It could vanish at anytime because some anonymous person in charge of the data base presses a button. The term "being Googled" need not only apply to the function of the search engine.

Ever since I started Fremantlebiz four years ago I realised this risk . I've routinely generated a PDF and paper copy of each day's entry as soon as it goes on line. I also keep the draft version which is done on a word processor before being transferred to the client uploader. The entire set of digital versions are regularly transferred to a CD, and copies of the PDF files lodged on other computers in the house. I'm even happy to provide a set of PDF copies on disk to anyone who is interested in the interest of data survival. Just ask.

I don't understand the true purpose of free services like Picasa and LiveJournal. There are hundreds of others like them. I suspect it's not altruistic. The I think the data being gathered has to have some other undisclosed purpose. The data facilities would have to be enormous, and very expensive to handle the huge quantity of material being stored by millions of bloggers and photographers each day.

While I've written over a million and a quarter words in four years, they only take up the memory allocation for a single medium sized photo. I've been a bit conservative with my online images. For the most part they are there to illustrate my writings. In comparison, many people have thousands of images thousands stored online and any written explanations for them seem rare.

When I was attempting to figure out what had happened with the removal of the Picasa comments option yesterday I did an image search on London. Can you believe it came back with a a list of over 17.6 million images. 17,669,205 to be precise. Paris came back with far more, 204, 442, 261.

It's true, check them yourself. Paris is obviously more popular than London. In comparison, Fremantle returned a paltry 92,691.

Perhaps now you might understand the paradox. In a world driven by greed, why is so much data storage space being made available for free? If I go down to the local Officeworks store and by a 2 gigabyte memory card for my camera it'll cost me twenty dollars. How many gigabytes of memory would be required for so many images on Picasa? Plus there are obviously far more images than for the three places I've just cited.

Who is really paying for it, and why? Frankly, I don't go for any explanation about them being part of a scheme for generating advertising revenue. Can someone "please explain?"

I'm going to put up a small picture of a place which returned a zero result in a search - Cosmo Newbery. It was an remote Aboriginal community my wife and I managed in 1986. My face had been blacked up with charcoal and I'd arrived for my Santa duties on a bicycle from out of the desert. My wife made the Santa suit from flour bags, which she dyed. There was much amusement amongst the adults, and the younger kids thought I was the real deal.

When I just put the image into Picasa, I saw that the comment option had been restored, so all is well again, until the next time. Maybe someone will actually leave a comment?

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!